Her name wasn’t Miranda, but it had the same number of syllables and conjured the same innate dignity.
She was, without exaggeration a dead ringer for a young Sigourney Weaver, albeit one with more European sophistication and intelligence. She had jade green eyes, pale, flawless skin and long tangled dark blonde hair that tumbled almost to her waist. Her figure was lithe and willowy, she stood about 5’8” on endless legs, and had smallish feet with high arches and beautifully formed smallish breasts graced with smallish pink nipples.
She was impossibly shy, sweetly awkward, sometimes adorably naïve, women hated her, and she had no idea how much she loved having her armpits lickled or her feet played with until we slept together for the first time.
According to my journal I met her on June 20, 1986, in a theatre queue at the National in London. Age 23, she was on her own and only happened to be standing behind me in the lineup because the show she’d originally wanted to see in one of the National’s other two theatres had sold out unexpectedly; I was with a theatrical colleague named ‘J.’ who became very famous thirty years on and has won all sorts of awards for which I’ll never be considered...
I chatted to her- she answered in monosyllables but I took this for shyness rather than instant loathing, persisted, and in later conversations found I’d been correct in that assumption. It transpired that she spoke fluent Russian which she’d studied at the University of Bristol, a language learned specifically because, she said, she was so inhibited that she couldn’t bring herself to be emotional while speaking English, but the Russian language gave her that desperately-needed release. A touch of strange…
As J.’s older brother was in a two-hander about WW1 poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen called ‘Not About Heroes’ (in the business called ‘Not About Heteros’ in the same way ‘Arsenic and Old Lace is known as ‘Lace Knicks and Old Arse’), we all saw that show, and joined his brother at a cast party afterwards. Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellen (both pre-knighthood in those days) Eleanor Bron, and Tim (Rocky Horror Show) Curry were there and we all chatted. These actors realized J. and I had our way to make and were friendly to us. Miranda was an alien to the entertainment industry and found the people and conversations quite fascinating. I asked for her number later that evening and she favoured me with it.
On June 29th, 1986 we saw ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. She looked stunning beautiful, hair loose, in a white 1920s-influenced dress, a white straw cloche hat with a broad black band, and matching white sandals. After the show we listened to Alain Stivell’s Rennaisance de l’Harpe Celtique on my record player (1980s, children…) as I slowly and gently washed her feet with a wet cloth and some soap, and dried them. ‘None of my lovers has ever caressed my feet before’, she smiled, apparently intrigued though a bit shy. We made love, very slowly and afterwards she quietly told me she loved me, which I found odd, it being so soon. For the second round that night (ah, vanish’d youth, vanish’d virility…) she grinned and arched an eyebrow, turned her bottom upward, waggled it at me and smiled in an even more interesting manner. We did it doggy style. A gentleman doesn’t refuse…
Later on I found she was looking for a substitute for her beloved first boyfriend, an intra-Berlin Wall East German who’d deflowered her in a small Soviet town where both had met while spending a university semester to improve their Russian.
And note had been taken of her language study from on high. MI5, she told me, somewhat surprised, had made an approach to her in a London park earlier that year via an innocuous little old lady who joined her on a bench and struck up a conversation, then unexpectedly (because Miranda hadn't 'introduced herself') addressed her by her full name, asking if she’d like to ‘serve her country’.
I suspect the theatricality of that meeting was done for effect, especially because around two weeks later a homeless man staggered up to her in another park, then also addressed her by name, quietly admonishing her in an upper-class accent because she had an East German boyfriend she’d not mentioned, and was thus liable to being blackmailed and turned by the Soviets. ‘The Spooks’ had checked up on her with great efficiency, and told her via the posh-voiced bogus hobo that the offer would have to be withdrawn for that reason.
How does one sum up a bundle of contradictions, a woman whom I would have been delighted to marry had not subsequent events demonstrated that because things didn’t work out I’d been shielded not merely from a bullet but instead from an atomic bomb?
She was reticent and undemonstrative, yet happily went to nudist saunas with me and loved exploring most sexual variations as long as (unfortunately…) we were the only two involved. When we went to a fetish club once, she was utterly fascinated by the sight of a beautiful young couple making love on a sofa, and watched raptly until they’d finished.
She was not wildly responsive but sometimes would quietly and in so many words ask me to fuck her hard, doggy style, ‘until you make me scream’. She hated to be tickled, calling it ‘torture’ but admitted grudgingly that in combination with bondage it boosted her orgasms. She liked to be ravished while partially clothed, saying with a combination of shame and an air of the cat that ate the canary that it made her feel ‘all dirty’. She liked to be teased sexually until she begged, and even better if she was ‘forced’ to beg in Anglo-Saxonisms.
I recall one occasion when she was face down on chest and knees, my left hand pressing down between her shoulder blades, my own knees keeping her thighs parted and my right hand busy elsewhere. ‘Tell me, my dearest, and most beautiful captive, what’s this?’, I ‘Basil Rathboned’, lubricated fingertip flickering as she finally gasped, ‘My anus…’
‘You know what it’s really called, and you know what you want me to keep doing, and you know exactly what you want to ask me… politely’, and I kept going, with all the maddening gentleness and calm I could somehow muster. My prick felt like a concrete pipe ready to burst because I wanted to fuck her so badly, and she moaned and convulsed and pleaded for another five minutes or so before finally and at long last half-sobbing, ‘Please keep tickling my… my arsehole’ then shrieked and came like I’d never seen her come before.
Her ex had taken both her virginities so there was no point in my buggering her then, which I’m not terribly into anyway, but things finished up very nicely nevertheless, even if she was too embarrassed to talk to me for five or so minutes afterward.
And she liked wine- when a bit tipsy she’d lose her inhibitions, mostly. We were making love once after she’d had a few drinks and she was responding splendidly, with lovely vocalisations. Then right in the middle of a delightful series of moans and shrieks she suddenly sat up, collaterally flinging me to the foot of the bed in the process, then rose to her knees, grabbed my shoulders as I sprawled like the central figure in Michelangelo’s Pieta, and said with complete earnestness in an incredibly embarrassed fashion, “‘Marcel’! Do other girls make those APPALLING NOISES??!!”
I thought I’d pretty much seen every variation of female sexuality (youth is both naïve and egotistical) so her asking me to masturbate between her breasts was not a surprise but she would always rub the byproduct into her bosom very solemnly and contemplatively, and quietly say that it made her feel maternal.
Once in her very upper-middle class accent she shyly asked me to fuck her armpit. And that was something I’d never heard of, but I reached for some lubricant and she panted and giggled all the way through it, biting me on the hip as we both climaxed though I’d not touched her intimately.
Miranda’s feet had an interesting quirk. While her high arches (three per foot is standard, two longitudinal and one transverse; she liked it and would giggle when I’d enumerate the full set of six with my forefinger and mock portentous solemnity) were faultless and her soles sensitive and uncallused, the second toe of both feet was shorter than any of the others; actually recessed for want of a better word. She would always ask if I found them ugly, and because they were hers I said no and meant it.
I had taken a few snapshots of her, which I took to a modeling agency. They immediately set up a meeting for her, which she attended in a somewhat bewildered fashion. Delighted that she was a patrician-looking young woman who could also ride horses, they offered her a contract and some free test shots with various photographers, but she was too shy to take up the offer, being ambivalent about her looks and constantly managing to find fault with them.
Once we were out walking and she dutifully and prosaically adjusted one of her stockings as we were passing a building site. All the workers immediately began howling their delighted appreciation at her from their perches on the scaffolding, and she honestly didn’t know why.
Another time she came to stay a few nights with me when I was out of London doing a play in a large provincial theatre, and dropped by my dressing room between the matinee and the evening performance. And with a prim smile combined with an item from my makeup box she shed her tights and gave me a highly memorable, languidly protracted coldcream-enhanced footjob between her soft soles, augmented with some pretty talented stroking from her toes. I was very relaxed indeed for that night’s performance.
After a bit of experimentation she decided that she didn’t like to be spanked, so I demurred permanently.
I recall a rainy London Sunday afternoon spent on the same long faux-leather couch on which Deborah D’Arc and I had played upon a year or so earlier. Miranda wore a T-shirt, and black trousers with sheer tan tights beneath. We lay at opposite ends, reading.
I held one of her stockinged feet gently, then lazily explored the gentle hills and valleys of its underside. She stifled a smile and pretended to ignore me. Cupping her heel gently, I slowly began circling her sole from ball to arch with my fingertip, watching her lips tremble and her toes point and wriggle. ‘Please, ‘Marcel’, not the soles of my feet’, she whispered breathily, eyes closed, then her hips began moving. ‘Fuck’, she murmured, and this was a girl who basically never swore. And again, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck’ with each ticklish flicker until, finally, she laughed. Never freely because that was not in her inhibited nature, but tightly and helplessly which in its way was far more erotic. And we made love afterwards. She always gave a very faint snarl and dug in her nails when I first entered her. ‘You do have a magnificent cock’, she said, not meeting my eye. She’d hesitantly kiss up and down its length now and again, but would never suck.
“You’re a master in bed”, she told me once, then hastily qualified that with “I mean ‘very good’, not MY master. That wouldn’t be right.” I took her to see 9 1/2 Weeks because she liked its star Mickey Rourke so much, but she was offended by the S&M aspect of it and walked out. I followed and calmed her down.
We stayed lovers. I held her one night and told her I never thought we’d have lasted so long, and she said she’d been thinking the same thing, then sighed quietly and kissed me before falling asleep in my arms. (This is actually quite uncomfortable, children, and requires subtle extrication…)
I had no four poster bed in those impecunious days; my foam sofabed mattress was on the floor without any points of attachment. I went to a hardware store and bought four big screweyes, and installed them in the baseboard of my room, two each, widely spaced on opposite walls and bought a set of leather cuffs and some twine. I was in my 20s and still learning. The Internet was still unheard of and I had nowhere to go for lessons.
At my request she had shaved her vulva and looked indescribably beautiful spread-eagled and secured, helpless and immobile as I used feathers and fingertips and fingernails and tongue to tickle her- neck, sides, the smooth hollows of her underarms, her inner thighs, her soles and the stems of her wriggling toes as she panted and squeaked and trembled, then lubricant and more tongue and a vibrator and finally my cock until she was deliciously comatose- but nevertheless she hardly made a sound. It was frustrating, as if she had a core I could never access.
Yet when orgasming she’d laugh helplessly in near-hysterics, a reaction I never was able to elicit when tickling her. I’ve never encountered that before or since.
I was cast in a very important, arduous lead in an exhausting play called The Dresser, with multipage monologues to memorise because the troubled gay character I was portraying is a babbling, compulsive talker. I dedicated my performance to her in the theatre programme by name, in Russian (which is of course written in Cyrillic letters) as a sort of secret for her alone since few other audience members would be able to read it.
Miranda told me later with constrained pride- nothing was ever overt with her- that some old friends of the family had seen the show, unaware of me or that I was seeing her, and had told her mum that they were amazed by it, and especially by my performance. At this point the Impecunious Bum of an Actor became more acceptable to her family.
But we drifted apart. She took a job with a British company, based in the old Soviet Union, I wound up working in North America for a few years (she did visit me once but was typically very detached), and this being the Olden Days, without internet, email or the ability to videochat the miles and the months and the years and other people loosened our ties. And yet something always remained, and while we did not sleep together any more we’d try to keep in touch via snailmail and the occasional telephone call.
Living in London again for a few years, I invited her to another show, in which I played a louche, languid and evil 19th century man, an amoral master thief whose ethos was ‘Misery loves chaos, and chaos loves company’.
At the very end of the play, with the handsome romantic lead at sabre point, instead of killing the man he frees him with a day’s head start, relishing the challenge of tracking him down, saying, ‘Hide well. It will amuse me. And I want to be amused for a long, long time’.
She was upset afterwards, and troubled, asking me over tea in a nearby café why I was playing someone so evil and saying it would corrupt my soul. I had no idea what she was going on about; she’d seen me play many characters both good and bad over the years (even an American prison guard who instigated and permitted the murder by an inmate gang of a middle-class child molester left in his care) and knew it was only make-believe. And then she rose and left abruptly.
Because things were fading away I played the gentlemanly Victorian suitor and returned all of her love letters- about ten years’ worth- in a large envelope. I wish I’d kept them. I want to re-read them now.
I visited her once more after that occasion, some months later in mid-spring, in Suffolk where she lived by herself in a little stone cottage she’d bought. She was still beautiful but it was as if something had sucked the honey from her, and I can’t figure out a better way of saying it. We chatted; I had tea and she mixed herself a couple of pretty strong drinks. I gave her a footrub for old time’s sake, but she did not react except to thank me, and asked if I thought she should become a ‘healer’.
I rang her a few months after that but her phone had been disconnected. No word from her. And after a year I rang the company for which she worked, asking to speak to her.
‘She… doesn’t work here any more’, said a well-bred woman’s voice after a pause, then continued, ‘She was unhappy’, and wouldn’t be drawn further, except to say I should contact her family. I had an old address for her parents and wrote them, supplying a phone number. Her younger sister rang in a day or two with the news I suspected.
Miranda had been dead for quite a while. It transpired that her increasing strangeness over the years was due to the progress of undiagnosed schizophrenia, for which she’d finally been institutionalized. But after a month the very clever, very intelligent and very desperate woman had successfully counterfeited sanity and been released.
The receipts found with her body showed that she’d acquired sufficient pills at various pharmacies to circumvent the UK laws against purchasing lethal doses. The autopsy revealed she’d taken a cocktail of her hoarded drugs, washed down with spirits. There was also a note to her family but of course I did not ask for details.
As Lewis Carroll wrote about Alice Pleasance Liddell, the original Alice in Wonderland,
'Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.
She still haunts me, phantomwise;
Alice, moving under skies,
Never seen by waking eyes…’
and I still think of Miranda pretty much every day too, and wonder if I could have done anything to help. But ultimately people are responsible for the choices they make, and even if I’d somehow known and called the paramedics for that episode it would only have postponed the inevitable because she would have kept trying. There’s no cure yet for that particular mental illness.
And Shakespeare understood this as well, because he had Macbeth and the Doctor discuss the mental condition causing Lady Macbeth to sleepwalk, as he pleads:
‘Cure her of that!
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?’
To which the doctor replies helplessly,
‘Therein the patient
Must minister to herself.’
But poor, mad Miranda could not.
As far as getting over her demise goes, the best I can say is that as the time has flowed past I have become used to it.
More specifically, I have become sadly used to a terrible event that happened twenty years ago today, on August 4th, 2000.
----------------------------------------
‘Whatever span the Fates allow,
Ere I shall be as she is now,
Still in my bosom's inmost cell
Shall that deep-treasured memory dwell:
That, more than language can express,
Pure miracle of loveliness,
Whose voice so sweet, whose eyes so bright,
Were my soul's music, and its light,
In those blest days, when life was new,
And hope was false, but love was true.’
-Thomas Peacock, (1785–1866)
And ‘Whatever span the Fates allow’ is sadly prophetic, because the cancer that’s been afflicting me for the past two years has recently progressed to an inoperable Stage 4, and from what the doctors have told me I know that I will be joining Miranda in the Void before too many months have passed.
I doubt there’s anything beyond the grave, no Paradise or Afterlife or Heaven or Eden but if so, perhaps it consists of one’s earthly spirit being riven into an infinite number of identical clones, each one free to pursue whatever interesting path we regretted not taking when two roads beckoned in various situations throughout life and the entire history of the world.
One simultaneous incarnation might enjoy a paradisiacal and thoroughly vanilla white picket fence suburban homelife with a grown-up second grade crush, in a relationship completely bereft of kinks, another might woo fair maidens as a knight at an after- jousting banquet, perhaps a third is an inveterate fetish clubber who never gets turned down throughout an eternal night’s debauchery, and who knows what the rest are up to since they’ll never meet and are unaware of one another’s existence...
If that’s the case, perhaps one of Miranda’s clones will find a perfect forever with her German ex, and one of my clones, unaware of what all my others are up to, will finally have the privilege of making Miranda laugh in the way I always wanted to hear, and may the peals of my lost love’s sweet, exquisitely tormented, and at long last ecstatically uninhibited, tear-crowned laughter ring throughout eternity.
This is my final post.
Goodbye and good luck to all of you.
All the tales:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?311386-Tales-of-Times-Gone-to-Dust
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?316538-This-does-me-no-credit-non-con-possible-trggers
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...efoot-After-the-Park-quot-Some-sexual-content
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?317632-Laughs-via-a-Charity-Shop-Sexual-content
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...Arc-a-very-long-post-with-some-sexual-content
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...irst-of-Three-Six-foot-Women-tickled-part-one
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...-Footer-The-Tortured-Laughter-of-Attalie-Yaws
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?321704-Third-Six-Footer-Tickling-a-Prodomme
She was, without exaggeration a dead ringer for a young Sigourney Weaver, albeit one with more European sophistication and intelligence. She had jade green eyes, pale, flawless skin and long tangled dark blonde hair that tumbled almost to her waist. Her figure was lithe and willowy, she stood about 5’8” on endless legs, and had smallish feet with high arches and beautifully formed smallish breasts graced with smallish pink nipples.
She was impossibly shy, sweetly awkward, sometimes adorably naïve, women hated her, and she had no idea how much she loved having her armpits lickled or her feet played with until we slept together for the first time.
According to my journal I met her on June 20, 1986, in a theatre queue at the National in London. Age 23, she was on her own and only happened to be standing behind me in the lineup because the show she’d originally wanted to see in one of the National’s other two theatres had sold out unexpectedly; I was with a theatrical colleague named ‘J.’ who became very famous thirty years on and has won all sorts of awards for which I’ll never be considered...
I chatted to her- she answered in monosyllables but I took this for shyness rather than instant loathing, persisted, and in later conversations found I’d been correct in that assumption. It transpired that she spoke fluent Russian which she’d studied at the University of Bristol, a language learned specifically because, she said, she was so inhibited that she couldn’t bring herself to be emotional while speaking English, but the Russian language gave her that desperately-needed release. A touch of strange…
As J.’s older brother was in a two-hander about WW1 poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen called ‘Not About Heroes’ (in the business called ‘Not About Heteros’ in the same way ‘Arsenic and Old Lace is known as ‘Lace Knicks and Old Arse’), we all saw that show, and joined his brother at a cast party afterwards. Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellen (both pre-knighthood in those days) Eleanor Bron, and Tim (Rocky Horror Show) Curry were there and we all chatted. These actors realized J. and I had our way to make and were friendly to us. Miranda was an alien to the entertainment industry and found the people and conversations quite fascinating. I asked for her number later that evening and she favoured me with it.
On June 29th, 1986 we saw ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. She looked stunning beautiful, hair loose, in a white 1920s-influenced dress, a white straw cloche hat with a broad black band, and matching white sandals. After the show we listened to Alain Stivell’s Rennaisance de l’Harpe Celtique on my record player (1980s, children…) as I slowly and gently washed her feet with a wet cloth and some soap, and dried them. ‘None of my lovers has ever caressed my feet before’, she smiled, apparently intrigued though a bit shy. We made love, very slowly and afterwards she quietly told me she loved me, which I found odd, it being so soon. For the second round that night (ah, vanish’d youth, vanish’d virility…) she grinned and arched an eyebrow, turned her bottom upward, waggled it at me and smiled in an even more interesting manner. We did it doggy style. A gentleman doesn’t refuse…
Later on I found she was looking for a substitute for her beloved first boyfriend, an intra-Berlin Wall East German who’d deflowered her in a small Soviet town where both had met while spending a university semester to improve their Russian.
And note had been taken of her language study from on high. MI5, she told me, somewhat surprised, had made an approach to her in a London park earlier that year via an innocuous little old lady who joined her on a bench and struck up a conversation, then unexpectedly (because Miranda hadn't 'introduced herself') addressed her by her full name, asking if she’d like to ‘serve her country’.
I suspect the theatricality of that meeting was done for effect, especially because around two weeks later a homeless man staggered up to her in another park, then also addressed her by name, quietly admonishing her in an upper-class accent because she had an East German boyfriend she’d not mentioned, and was thus liable to being blackmailed and turned by the Soviets. ‘The Spooks’ had checked up on her with great efficiency, and told her via the posh-voiced bogus hobo that the offer would have to be withdrawn for that reason.
How does one sum up a bundle of contradictions, a woman whom I would have been delighted to marry had not subsequent events demonstrated that because things didn’t work out I’d been shielded not merely from a bullet but instead from an atomic bomb?
She was reticent and undemonstrative, yet happily went to nudist saunas with me and loved exploring most sexual variations as long as (unfortunately…) we were the only two involved. When we went to a fetish club once, she was utterly fascinated by the sight of a beautiful young couple making love on a sofa, and watched raptly until they’d finished.
She was not wildly responsive but sometimes would quietly and in so many words ask me to fuck her hard, doggy style, ‘until you make me scream’. She hated to be tickled, calling it ‘torture’ but admitted grudgingly that in combination with bondage it boosted her orgasms. She liked to be ravished while partially clothed, saying with a combination of shame and an air of the cat that ate the canary that it made her feel ‘all dirty’. She liked to be teased sexually until she begged, and even better if she was ‘forced’ to beg in Anglo-Saxonisms.
I recall one occasion when she was face down on chest and knees, my left hand pressing down between her shoulder blades, my own knees keeping her thighs parted and my right hand busy elsewhere. ‘Tell me, my dearest, and most beautiful captive, what’s this?’, I ‘Basil Rathboned’, lubricated fingertip flickering as she finally gasped, ‘My anus…’
‘You know what it’s really called, and you know what you want me to keep doing, and you know exactly what you want to ask me… politely’, and I kept going, with all the maddening gentleness and calm I could somehow muster. My prick felt like a concrete pipe ready to burst because I wanted to fuck her so badly, and she moaned and convulsed and pleaded for another five minutes or so before finally and at long last half-sobbing, ‘Please keep tickling my… my arsehole’ then shrieked and came like I’d never seen her come before.
Her ex had taken both her virginities so there was no point in my buggering her then, which I’m not terribly into anyway, but things finished up very nicely nevertheless, even if she was too embarrassed to talk to me for five or so minutes afterward.
And she liked wine- when a bit tipsy she’d lose her inhibitions, mostly. We were making love once after she’d had a few drinks and she was responding splendidly, with lovely vocalisations. Then right in the middle of a delightful series of moans and shrieks she suddenly sat up, collaterally flinging me to the foot of the bed in the process, then rose to her knees, grabbed my shoulders as I sprawled like the central figure in Michelangelo’s Pieta, and said with complete earnestness in an incredibly embarrassed fashion, “‘Marcel’! Do other girls make those APPALLING NOISES??!!”
I thought I’d pretty much seen every variation of female sexuality (youth is both naïve and egotistical) so her asking me to masturbate between her breasts was not a surprise but she would always rub the byproduct into her bosom very solemnly and contemplatively, and quietly say that it made her feel maternal.
Once in her very upper-middle class accent she shyly asked me to fuck her armpit. And that was something I’d never heard of, but I reached for some lubricant and she panted and giggled all the way through it, biting me on the hip as we both climaxed though I’d not touched her intimately.
Miranda’s feet had an interesting quirk. While her high arches (three per foot is standard, two longitudinal and one transverse; she liked it and would giggle when I’d enumerate the full set of six with my forefinger and mock portentous solemnity) were faultless and her soles sensitive and uncallused, the second toe of both feet was shorter than any of the others; actually recessed for want of a better word. She would always ask if I found them ugly, and because they were hers I said no and meant it.
I had taken a few snapshots of her, which I took to a modeling agency. They immediately set up a meeting for her, which she attended in a somewhat bewildered fashion. Delighted that she was a patrician-looking young woman who could also ride horses, they offered her a contract and some free test shots with various photographers, but she was too shy to take up the offer, being ambivalent about her looks and constantly managing to find fault with them.
Once we were out walking and she dutifully and prosaically adjusted one of her stockings as we were passing a building site. All the workers immediately began howling their delighted appreciation at her from their perches on the scaffolding, and she honestly didn’t know why.
Another time she came to stay a few nights with me when I was out of London doing a play in a large provincial theatre, and dropped by my dressing room between the matinee and the evening performance. And with a prim smile combined with an item from my makeup box she shed her tights and gave me a highly memorable, languidly protracted coldcream-enhanced footjob between her soft soles, augmented with some pretty talented stroking from her toes. I was very relaxed indeed for that night’s performance.
After a bit of experimentation she decided that she didn’t like to be spanked, so I demurred permanently.
I recall a rainy London Sunday afternoon spent on the same long faux-leather couch on which Deborah D’Arc and I had played upon a year or so earlier. Miranda wore a T-shirt, and black trousers with sheer tan tights beneath. We lay at opposite ends, reading.
I held one of her stockinged feet gently, then lazily explored the gentle hills and valleys of its underside. She stifled a smile and pretended to ignore me. Cupping her heel gently, I slowly began circling her sole from ball to arch with my fingertip, watching her lips tremble and her toes point and wriggle. ‘Please, ‘Marcel’, not the soles of my feet’, she whispered breathily, eyes closed, then her hips began moving. ‘Fuck’, she murmured, and this was a girl who basically never swore. And again, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck’ with each ticklish flicker until, finally, she laughed. Never freely because that was not in her inhibited nature, but tightly and helplessly which in its way was far more erotic. And we made love afterwards. She always gave a very faint snarl and dug in her nails when I first entered her. ‘You do have a magnificent cock’, she said, not meeting my eye. She’d hesitantly kiss up and down its length now and again, but would never suck.
“You’re a master in bed”, she told me once, then hastily qualified that with “I mean ‘very good’, not MY master. That wouldn’t be right.” I took her to see 9 1/2 Weeks because she liked its star Mickey Rourke so much, but she was offended by the S&M aspect of it and walked out. I followed and calmed her down.
We stayed lovers. I held her one night and told her I never thought we’d have lasted so long, and she said she’d been thinking the same thing, then sighed quietly and kissed me before falling asleep in my arms. (This is actually quite uncomfortable, children, and requires subtle extrication…)
I had no four poster bed in those impecunious days; my foam sofabed mattress was on the floor without any points of attachment. I went to a hardware store and bought four big screweyes, and installed them in the baseboard of my room, two each, widely spaced on opposite walls and bought a set of leather cuffs and some twine. I was in my 20s and still learning. The Internet was still unheard of and I had nowhere to go for lessons.
At my request she had shaved her vulva and looked indescribably beautiful spread-eagled and secured, helpless and immobile as I used feathers and fingertips and fingernails and tongue to tickle her- neck, sides, the smooth hollows of her underarms, her inner thighs, her soles and the stems of her wriggling toes as she panted and squeaked and trembled, then lubricant and more tongue and a vibrator and finally my cock until she was deliciously comatose- but nevertheless she hardly made a sound. It was frustrating, as if she had a core I could never access.
Yet when orgasming she’d laugh helplessly in near-hysterics, a reaction I never was able to elicit when tickling her. I’ve never encountered that before or since.
I was cast in a very important, arduous lead in an exhausting play called The Dresser, with multipage monologues to memorise because the troubled gay character I was portraying is a babbling, compulsive talker. I dedicated my performance to her in the theatre programme by name, in Russian (which is of course written in Cyrillic letters) as a sort of secret for her alone since few other audience members would be able to read it.
Miranda told me later with constrained pride- nothing was ever overt with her- that some old friends of the family had seen the show, unaware of me or that I was seeing her, and had told her mum that they were amazed by it, and especially by my performance. At this point the Impecunious Bum of an Actor became more acceptable to her family.
But we drifted apart. She took a job with a British company, based in the old Soviet Union, I wound up working in North America for a few years (she did visit me once but was typically very detached), and this being the Olden Days, without internet, email or the ability to videochat the miles and the months and the years and other people loosened our ties. And yet something always remained, and while we did not sleep together any more we’d try to keep in touch via snailmail and the occasional telephone call.
Living in London again for a few years, I invited her to another show, in which I played a louche, languid and evil 19th century man, an amoral master thief whose ethos was ‘Misery loves chaos, and chaos loves company’.
At the very end of the play, with the handsome romantic lead at sabre point, instead of killing the man he frees him with a day’s head start, relishing the challenge of tracking him down, saying, ‘Hide well. It will amuse me. And I want to be amused for a long, long time’.
She was upset afterwards, and troubled, asking me over tea in a nearby café why I was playing someone so evil and saying it would corrupt my soul. I had no idea what she was going on about; she’d seen me play many characters both good and bad over the years (even an American prison guard who instigated and permitted the murder by an inmate gang of a middle-class child molester left in his care) and knew it was only make-believe. And then she rose and left abruptly.
Because things were fading away I played the gentlemanly Victorian suitor and returned all of her love letters- about ten years’ worth- in a large envelope. I wish I’d kept them. I want to re-read them now.
I visited her once more after that occasion, some months later in mid-spring, in Suffolk where she lived by herself in a little stone cottage she’d bought. She was still beautiful but it was as if something had sucked the honey from her, and I can’t figure out a better way of saying it. We chatted; I had tea and she mixed herself a couple of pretty strong drinks. I gave her a footrub for old time’s sake, but she did not react except to thank me, and asked if I thought she should become a ‘healer’.
I rang her a few months after that but her phone had been disconnected. No word from her. And after a year I rang the company for which she worked, asking to speak to her.
‘She… doesn’t work here any more’, said a well-bred woman’s voice after a pause, then continued, ‘She was unhappy’, and wouldn’t be drawn further, except to say I should contact her family. I had an old address for her parents and wrote them, supplying a phone number. Her younger sister rang in a day or two with the news I suspected.
Miranda had been dead for quite a while. It transpired that her increasing strangeness over the years was due to the progress of undiagnosed schizophrenia, for which she’d finally been institutionalized. But after a month the very clever, very intelligent and very desperate woman had successfully counterfeited sanity and been released.
The receipts found with her body showed that she’d acquired sufficient pills at various pharmacies to circumvent the UK laws against purchasing lethal doses. The autopsy revealed she’d taken a cocktail of her hoarded drugs, washed down with spirits. There was also a note to her family but of course I did not ask for details.
As Lewis Carroll wrote about Alice Pleasance Liddell, the original Alice in Wonderland,
'Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.
She still haunts me, phantomwise;
Alice, moving under skies,
Never seen by waking eyes…’
and I still think of Miranda pretty much every day too, and wonder if I could have done anything to help. But ultimately people are responsible for the choices they make, and even if I’d somehow known and called the paramedics for that episode it would only have postponed the inevitable because she would have kept trying. There’s no cure yet for that particular mental illness.
And Shakespeare understood this as well, because he had Macbeth and the Doctor discuss the mental condition causing Lady Macbeth to sleepwalk, as he pleads:
‘Cure her of that!
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?’
To which the doctor replies helplessly,
‘Therein the patient
Must minister to herself.’
But poor, mad Miranda could not.
As far as getting over her demise goes, the best I can say is that as the time has flowed past I have become used to it.
More specifically, I have become sadly used to a terrible event that happened twenty years ago today, on August 4th, 2000.
----------------------------------------
‘Whatever span the Fates allow,
Ere I shall be as she is now,
Still in my bosom's inmost cell
Shall that deep-treasured memory dwell:
That, more than language can express,
Pure miracle of loveliness,
Whose voice so sweet, whose eyes so bright,
Were my soul's music, and its light,
In those blest days, when life was new,
And hope was false, but love was true.’
-Thomas Peacock, (1785–1866)
And ‘Whatever span the Fates allow’ is sadly prophetic, because the cancer that’s been afflicting me for the past two years has recently progressed to an inoperable Stage 4, and from what the doctors have told me I know that I will be joining Miranda in the Void before too many months have passed.
I doubt there’s anything beyond the grave, no Paradise or Afterlife or Heaven or Eden but if so, perhaps it consists of one’s earthly spirit being riven into an infinite number of identical clones, each one free to pursue whatever interesting path we regretted not taking when two roads beckoned in various situations throughout life and the entire history of the world.
One simultaneous incarnation might enjoy a paradisiacal and thoroughly vanilla white picket fence suburban homelife with a grown-up second grade crush, in a relationship completely bereft of kinks, another might woo fair maidens as a knight at an after- jousting banquet, perhaps a third is an inveterate fetish clubber who never gets turned down throughout an eternal night’s debauchery, and who knows what the rest are up to since they’ll never meet and are unaware of one another’s existence...
If that’s the case, perhaps one of Miranda’s clones will find a perfect forever with her German ex, and one of my clones, unaware of what all my others are up to, will finally have the privilege of making Miranda laugh in the way I always wanted to hear, and may the peals of my lost love’s sweet, exquisitely tormented, and at long last ecstatically uninhibited, tear-crowned laughter ring throughout eternity.
This is my final post.
Goodbye and good luck to all of you.
All the tales:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?311386-Tales-of-Times-Gone-to-Dust
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?316538-This-does-me-no-credit-non-con-possible-trggers
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...efoot-After-the-Park-quot-Some-sexual-content
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?317632-Laughs-via-a-Charity-Shop-Sexual-content
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...Arc-a-very-long-post-with-some-sexual-content
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...irst-of-Three-Six-foot-Women-tickled-part-one
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showth...-Footer-The-Tortured-Laughter-of-Attalie-Yaws
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?321704-Third-Six-Footer-Tickling-a-Prodomme
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